Defector revealed books of secrets

Vasili Mitrokhin, who has died aged 81, was the KGB archivist whose defection to Britain in 1992 brought a treasure trove of Soviet secrets to the West.

Mitrokhin's archive consisted of material culled from tens of thousands of top-secret KGB files, which he had laboriously copied down over 12 years and hidden in tins and milk crates underneath his dacha. It contained detailed records of every operation the KGB had mounted from its inception in 1917 to Mitrokhin's retirement in 1984, demonstrating the extent to which the KGB had successfully infiltrated the West and the way in which it had oppressed the Russian people.

Among other revelations, the papers disclosed that more than half of Soviet weapons were based on designs stolen from America; that the KGB had tapped the telephones of American officials, such as Henry Kissinger, and had spies in almost all the country's big defence contractors.

In France, at least 35 senior politicians were shown to have worked for the KGB during the Cold War. In Germany, the KGB was shown to have infiltrated all the major political parties, the judiciary and the police.

Also fascinating was the insight given into the absurd lengths to which the Russians were prepared to go to discredit those they regarded as ideological enemies. There was a plan to break the legs of Rudolf Nureyev, the ballet dancer, after he defected in the West in 1961. On one occasion a team of 18 KGB operatives was dispatched to the Philippines with instructions to ensure that the Soviet world chess champion, Anatoly Karpov, was not defeated by the defector Victor Korchnoi in the World Chess Championship. The methods used included putting a hypnotist in the front row of the audience, who stared at Korchnoi throughout the matches.

On September 11, 1999, the archive suddenly became news when serialisation of The Mitrokhin Archive, the book written by Mitrokhin with the historian Christopher Andrew, began in The Times. The revelations that captured media attention were not so much the disclosures about KGB operations against NATO and the suppression of dissent within the Soviet Union, but human interest stories about Soviet spies in Britain. These included Melita Norwood, an 87-year-old great-grandmother from Bexleyheath - the "spy who came in from the Co-op" - who was exposed as having been the KGB's longest-serving agent in Britain.

The acquisition of the Mitrokhin archive was a huge coup for British intelligence, which had recognised the value of the material after it had been turned down by the Americans.

But the revelations proved an embarrassment to the authorities when it emerged that the identity of the spies had been known to the security services since 1992 when the Mitrokhin archive was handed over to the British authorities, but no action had been taken.

Mitrokhin's motives were the subject of much speculation. He did not defect for the money and was not being blackmailed; nor did he seem to enjoy his new life in the West. Some suggested he had become embittered after being transferred from operational duties for the KGB to archives. But it is possible that his own explanation was the genuine one. He simply decided Soviet Communism was evil and should be opposed.

In handing over his archive, the only condition he imposed was that his work should be made public as a record for the Russian people and as a warning to future generations.

The son of a decorator, Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin was born in Yurasovo, in the rural Rayazan province of Soviet Russia. He entered artillery school, then attended university in Kazakhstan, graduating in history and law. Towards the end of World War II, he took a job in the military procurator's office at Kharkov in the Ukraine.

Then an idealistic communist, Mitrokhin entered the Higher Diplomatic Academy in Moscow and, in 1948, was recruited into the KI (the Committee of Information), the Soviet external service which was absorbed into the newly formed KGB in 1954.

During the 1950s he served on various undercover assignments overseas. In 1956, for example, he accompanied the Soviet team to the Olympic Games in Australia. But later that year, after he had apparently mishandled an operational assignment, he was moved from operational duties to the archives of the KGB's First Chief (Foreign Intelligence) Directorate, and told he would never work in the field again.

Mitrokhin sometimes dated the beginnings of his disillusionment to Khrushchev's famous speech to the Communist Party congress denouncing Stalin, though it seems he may have had doubts for some time before that. For years he had listened to the BBC and Voice of America, noting the gulf between their reports and party propaganda.

Yet when he began looking into the archives, he claimed to have been shocked by what he discovered about the KGB's repression of the Russian people. "I could not believe such evil," he recalled. "It was all planned, prepared, thought out in advance. It was a terrible shock when I read things."

When, in 1972, the archives were moved from the Lubyanka in Moscow to a new repository on the city outskirts, Mitrokhin seized his chance. Given the responsibility of checking and sealing about 300,000 files, he began making notes on the documents, which he smuggled out of the building in his shoes, trousers or coat. Had he been caught, he would have been executed.

Mitrokhin continued his clandestine activities for 12 years until he retired in 1984, when his boss, Vladimir Kryuchkov, congratulated him for his success in transferring the archives and his "irreproachable service to the state security authorities".

In retirement, Mitrokhin watched and waited. His opportunity came when the Soviet Union fell apart. In 1992, he obtained permission to take a holiday in Latvia. Taking samples of his archive with him, he walked into the American embassy in Riga and asked if he could defect. CIA officials at the embassy, struggling to cope with hundreds of Russian exiles fleeing the crumbling Soviet Union, were not interested. They reasoned Mitrokhin was not a spy, just a librarian, and the handwritten documents were probably fakes.

Mitrokhin then tried the nearby British embassy, which recognised his importance and made arrangements to spirit him out of the country. These were initially hampered by the need to retrieve the rest of the archive, still buried under Mitrokhin's dacha. A plan was hatched involving six MI6 officers dressed as workmen, who unearthed six trunks of material and loaded them into a van. On September 7, 1992, Mitrokhin, his family and his archive arrived in Britain.

So successful was the MI6 operation that, for some time, it seems the Russian authorities were unaware he had gone They then made a clumsy attempt to discredit the archive, by sending two apparent "defectors" to Western intelligence agencies who claimed that the KGB's successor, the SVR, had decided on a massive clear-out of superannuated agents and had chosen Mitrokhin to transmit their details to the West. By that time, though, it had become clear that Mitrokhin's material was too valuable for the SVR to have handed it over willingly, and the "defectors" were exposed as Russian plants.

The publication of The Mitrokhin Archive in 1999 was followed by other publications, including, in 2002, Mitrokhin's KGB Lexicon.

But life in exile was difficult for Mitrokhin, who lived in fear that he might be stalked by vengeful former comrades. He spoke little English, had few friends and was devastated when his wife, Nina, died in 1999. Interviewers noticed a sadness hanging over him.

The Mitrokhin archive led to resignations, arrests and a few prosecutions around the world, though there are believed to be about 300 Soviet sources still living in Britain and America who have not yet been publicly identified.